Alumni Updates

We love hearing the latest from alumni of our educational programs. Email us at [email protected] with your news. And to see past issues of our alumni newsletter, Nu?, download the pdfs at the bottom of this page.

After spending a year in Israel at Yeshivat Har Etzion, Ariel Amsellem (Great Jewish Books '14) is now an undergraduate at the University of Chicago.

Sarah Bunin Benor (Internship '94) writes: "I am working on a study of Hebrew use at North American Jewish summer camps, as well as an edited volume on Jewish languages. Also, I created a website featuring women born before the Nineteenth Amendment who were excited to vote for Hillary Clinton (iwaited96years.com). I'm now editing a book featuring the wisdom of many of these women."

Claudia Chahor (Steiner '13) writes: "I am now on family leave with my small daughter while looking for new job opportunities or professional retraining."

Eva Rose Cohen (Tent: Museums '14) draws and writes a bimonthly comic series for Mn Artists, a program of the Walker Art Center. The comic focuses on the lived experience of being an artist and touches on topics ranging from the creative process to artistic engagement with Black Lives Matter. She's also the school director and bar/bat mitzvah prep teacher for the Jewish Cultural School at Or Emet: Minnesota Congregation for Humanistic Judaism and teaches in the afternoon school at Talmud Torah of St. Paul. Eva recently co-taught a Holocaust art-focused class for Jewish teens in St. Paul and is excited to be showing work along with them in [Re]Telling, an upcoming exhibition at the Minneapolis Sabes JCC.

Jennie Crichlow (Tent: Museums '14) and Tyler Zimmer became engaged in November while visiting the Longwood Botanical Gardens. Jennie is a project manager at Dom & Tom, a digital product development agency specializing in emerging technologies including web, iOS, and Android.

Emma Eisenberg (Tent: Creative Writing '13 and Journalism '14) has started a website, fullfatties.com, whose mission is "consuming, promoting, and reviewing small-batch high-fat ice cream in the United States and beyond."

Rachel Kunstadt (Tent: Theater '13) is working as the program assistant for the Center for Jewish Living and Center for Israel at JCC Manhattan. Outside of the JCC, she writes musicals and plays, produces theater, and is the artistic director of LezCab, a nonprofit theater company for queer women. She lives in Manhattan with her shih tzu, Bernie.

Vilna My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, translated by Helen Mintz (Translation Fellowship '14), was published by Syracuse University Press in 2016. The book received the 2016 J.I. Segal Award for Translation of a Book on a Jewish Theme, as well as the 2016 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Yiddish.

Tanya Panova (Fellowship '15-16) was recently married and now lives in Moscow, where she leads tours of a house museum of the Russian writer Korney Chukovsky, who, she notes, is as well known in Russia as Dr. Seuss is in the United States; her experience leading tours at the Yiddish Book Center helped prepare her for that work, she adds. Tanya is a field fellow for the Wexler Oral History Project. "I am also illustrating a children's magazine from time to time and some fairy tales," she writes. "I hope that will be my primary occupation and really wish to illustrate children's books more. And on top of that, my husband was accepted for a post-doc Humboldt Stipendium at the University of Hamburg, so we are moving to Germany."

Jonathan Rotsztain (Tent: Comics '14) continues to publish Self-Loving Jew, a series of autobiographical comics claiming a secular, cultural Jewish identity, through the Koffler Centre of the Arts and the Forward's Scribe platform.

Andrea Schlosser (Tent: Comedy '14, Comics '14) has received her degree, summa cum laude, in North American studies, part of a double-major BA program. She recently founded her own proofreading company, called SCRIPTORIUM ANDREA SCHLOSSER. This year she will present her academic research on African American studies at the International James Baldwin Conference in Ankara, Turkey.

Emmanuelle Smith (Tent: Journalism '14) published her first children's book, Park Life (Fisherton Press), last year. "It charts a day in the life of a London park and of the people and animals that come through it," she writes. "I am currently working on two new books—one is for young adults, and the other is a story about Jewish meditation and mindfulness for young children. My 'day job' (which actually takes place in the evenings!) is as a community manager for Mumsnet, a UK-based parenting forum. I've also started a volunteering role I'm really excited about. It's at Maytree, a charity that offers sanctuary and support to people in suicidal crisis. Finally, I'm working on a project to turn a disused caretaker flat at my synagogue, South London Liberal Synagogue, into a home for a refugee family."

Ri J. Turner (Translation Fellowship '14) is in her second and final year of coursework at the Israeli Inter-University MA Program in Yiddish Studies; her home campus is Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She also works as a research and translation assistant at the Dov Sadan Publishing Project of Hebrew University, under the direction of professor Yechiel Szeintuch.

Menachem Wecker (Tent: Comics '14, Museums '14) recently married Nachama Soloveichik—who, he believes, speaks a fine Yiddish. He published an investigative feature about the CIA's art collection (with a Jewish angle) in the January/February 2017 issue of Playboy.

Max Weinreich (Steiner '16) writes: "I've been teaching a Brooklyn family Yiddish as a way of introducing them to the depth and diversity of Jewish history. I'm also several chapters into the Yiddish text of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I'm participating in the Great Jewish Books Book Club online forum."

Danielle Winter (Fellowship '13-14) is a K-to-5th-grade librarian for Hamilton Township School District, the fourth-biggest school district in New Jersey, where she leads story times and teaches information-literacy skills to more than 400 students each week.

David Winter (Tent: Creative Writing '15) is a 2016-18 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, where he is finishing his first book while working part time as a literary editor and arts administrator at the Stadler Center for Poetry.

Sarah Zarrow (Internship '01) received her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic studies and history from New York University and is now a research fellow at New Europe College in Bucharest, where, she tells us, she's turning her dissertation (on Polish-Jewish ethnography from the 1890s to 1939) into a book, hanging out in the archives, and eating all the mamaliga.